HOW DOES DESIGN AFFECT CONVERSIONS
Weve completed the Traffic Quality Analyzer system that analyzes your website traffic for and visitors behavior. It completely blew my mind by how much it improved my productivity to increase website conversions.
Today, I will tell you a story of how I got a website that produced zero sales for one whole year, to making several five hundred dollar sales every week. One of my clients whose name is Peter has two websites with Shopping Cart Elite, one website did a quarter of a million dollars in one year, the other did zero (Ill refer to it as the zero ). We were both a bit confused because the zero had competitive prices, decent website graphics, and traffic. Peter even put a special coupon code for 10% off everything from the website, and it still would not convert. I was convinced that the traffic was the problem because Peter did not put any unique content on the website, and he did not do any marketing or advertising. Most of the traffic was coming to the website from the marketing tool called Visitor Generated SEO that is natively built into Shopping Cart Elite.
The way Visitor Generated SEO works is you have visitors coming to your website, and searching for products using different variations of rich and long tail keywords. When they type something into the search bar, the relevant search results turn into an SEO indexable on the website that Google can access. That page is then automatically submitted to Google sitemap, and Google caches it within a few days. As a result, you are harvesting your visitors search keywords to build your SEO pages on the fly without an interaction, and then those can be found on Google when other people type the same keyword phrases. (Click here to see a Demo)
Website zero was started from scratch and every month it got more and more traffic. However, the traffic just wasnt converting. I told Peter to try paid advertising, but Peter did not agree with me that the traffic was the problem. So the website stalled for a year. Peter was going to shut the website down, but we were about to release the Traffic Quality Analyzer, and this tool would allow me to see if the quality of the traffic was really the problem. I asked Peter to give me one month to investigate why there were no conversions.
DAY 1 I went to Peters website (zero and started looking at the visitors behavior. I was surprised that there were very little fake visits, and surprisingly the real visits were engaging with the website. One thing that I confirmed is that I the effectiveness of the Visitor Generated SEO tool, this tool was generating free traffic automatically WITHOUT the website owners interaction, and actually delivering quality traffic.
One thing I noticed is that the real visitors were not going to the next after the product page to estimate the shipping. They were just sitting on the product page for 5 10 minutes before leaving. My conclusion is they went elsewhere to shop around during those 5-10 minutes. I had an idea, the target market for the products that zero was selling was aimed more towards an older crowd rather than younger. To verify this, I went to Quantcast to gather this information.
I was right as Quantcast showed that the majority of visitors were Caucasian upper guys who were in their late 40s . It struck me that zero looked way to trendy for a guy. I imagined my father browsing the Internet to find this product for his truck, and I concluded that he rather shop on a website that looked as it was designed back in 1995, rather than one designed in 2012. I assumed that a trendy website might look a bit too corporate for a guy, and he might look elsewhere to find an old school looking website.
I opened Microsoft Paint, and I made an ugly looking banner with a coupon code for 10% off. Then I put it as a site-wide rotating banner on every single of the website. I went to sleep with two thoughts in mind. First, I was pissed because I couldnt believe how wrong I was in underestimating the effectiveness of website graphics, and how it would affect a certain target market. Second, I was hoping that this would improve the conversions because I was out of logical ideas.
DAY 2 It was 11AM, and I get a Skype message from Peter. IGOR! You should look at my website more often I just got a sale. I was shocked at the fact that one simple graphic can make that big of a difference. This was a lesson that I learned that trendy graphic design is not always good for your website visitors. You need to do market and get it right so you can design your website for your target market, and not for you. It is also important to create effective calls to action to improve your website conversions that are designed specifically for the target market.
CONCLUSION Google Analytics is a piece of free crapware that will never do the job of helping you improve your conversions. I know its the norm nowadays, its Google Analytics! Everyone is using it. If everyone is going to jump off the roof, are you going to follow them as well? Besides the fact that Google Analytics doesnt even track your visitors all the time, Google Analytics combines the bounce rate of all your visitors, including real and fake. Why do I care about fake visitor bounce rate? My goal is to get rid of them, not analyze them. I care about real visitors ONLY, and I only want to analyze REAL visitors bounce rate. The real visitor bounce rate should be 0%, and in the worst case scenario it should be under 5%, and I should work to improve it to get it to 0%.
Google Analytics is an example of a crap analytic product designed by marketers for marketers in order to BS their clients. Marketers that are using Google Analytics to make logical marketing decisions have no idea on how to measure real results, they are using their gut more than their brain to make such decisions. Here is a great example, one of my clients paid $200 to get traffic for a specific campaign, the result was no sales made through the website. But that campaign did produce 18 phone calls that resulted in 10 sales over the phone. The total revenue for that $200 campaign was $12,000. What do you think a typical marketer would do who uses Google Analytics? He will see that there were no conversions according to Google Conversions in Adwords, and shut down the campaign. Shopping Cart Elite assigns a customer reference number on the footer of the website for every visitor, and when anyone calls by phone, you can enter that customer reference number to track where that visitor came from and measure it against your conversion tracking. This would result in using real analytics versus a marketers gut to make your marketing decisions.
Clicktale is an analytic tool that I used to recommend because it records visitors activity into a movie that you can watch. I am no longer recommending it because the problem with Clicktale is they dont differentiate real, suspicious and fake visits. You can have 60% of fake visits that look real according to Google Analytics, Clicktale and even to you. The problem is they look like real human visitors, but they are fake bots, and they are only confusing you.
Even though, you can eventually come up with a conclusion that something is fishy with a group of visitors that you analyzed through Clicktale, but by that time you would have wasted hundreds of hours analyzing this bad information. Why would you waste your time in analyzing bad information? Why would you waste your time in analyzing fake or low engagement visitors versus real visitors who are actually engaging with your website?
If you have no engagement from any of your visitors, this might indicate a whole different problem with your website. If you have some sales that you do have real engaged visitors, and you will find trends of similar visitors who are engaging the same way, but for some reason they dont buy your products. You should have a laser focus on those real engaging visitors and optimize your website for them.
All the analytic tools currently in the marketplace only show you a big picture of all your visitors. They combine ALL visitors including FAKE and real. All of the analytic tools in the market today are only good enough for marketers to BS their way to business owners so they can make themselves look as they know what they are talking about. In fact, they dont know crap. All they are doing is gambling the business owners money and using their gut to make their decisions. There is ZERO LOGIC in how most of these marketing firms make their decisions because they simply do not have the right analytic tools.
I am a Search Engine Marketing expert, and I will admit that the Traffic Quality Analyzer in Shopping Cart Elite will do a better job than ten of me in reporting the effectiveness of a marketing campaign. For example, it will give you results from your Adwords campaign that will be broken down by month, referrer, real visits, suspicious visits, fake visits, poor engagement, average engagement, and good engagement. It will even track people emailing you and calling you on the phone. It will recommend what keywords you should keep or remove, and it will tell you which referrer should be eliminated from sending you traffic to your website because it is wasting your money.
CLICK HERE TO SEE A SCREENSHOT OF THIS TOOL
I was stalemated for almost a year trying to fix Peters website because I was looking at the wrong thing. Once I used the Traffic Quality Analyzer it took me thirty minutes to tweak the website, and now it is getting several orders every week. Instead of wasting time analyzing the traffic, the Traffic Quality Analyzer clearly showed me that the traffic is GOOD, and traffic quality is not the problem. There was something else that was wrong, and there certainly was. It was able to me in the right direction, so I know where to look to fix the problem. If you dont have the right analytic tool to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaign, then you will never be able to improve your website conversions effectively. When you use Google Analytics, you are trying to a needle in a haystack, and its most likely never going to happen.
Traffic Quality Analyzer in Shopping Cart Elite is your needle in the haystack FINDER.
CAN I USE THIS TOOL WITHOUT MOVING TO SCE? We understand that switching platforms may not be an option for some companies. You can still use Traffic Quality Analyzer with your current website. You can use Shopping Cart Elite to create landing pages for your Adwords or other marketing campaigns, and then redirect the traffic from the landing page to your actual website. This will allow your traffic to pass through our algorithm and analyze the traffic quality for and Engagement.
The price for unlimited landing pages is only $99/mo. This can cut your Adwords expense by 50% without decreasing sales, and increase your conversions by double digits. Adometry sells a similar tool that is half as good to marketing agencies for ten thousand per month. If you skip this offer, you are crazy for not using it.
Get it right now and see the results for yourself.